Opinion pieces, travel articles, places and people; lots of poetry; commentary on current events and history and whatever else shows up on the radar. Articles have been numbered (since Sept. 2004). Go n-eiri an t-adh leat.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The king was in his counting housecounting all his money;Jock and I were chained in the dungeon,not the least bit funny.

The queen was in the parloureating cakes and honey;Jock and I were on bread and waterand our sores had gone all runny.

This is what you getfor being a Celtic Communist,lost back in the Middle Ages:tossed into cages, burnt at stakes,bound in chains with wife and wains,hurled into nearby lakes.

We preached the Third Stage of Capitalismwhile the world was concerned with Papal Schism,we were a bit, perhaps, before our time(garrotted, impaled, then buried in lime)but people need to be told things.

Jock was a Seeker, a fiery speaker,"Guid wha' tha haw an tschock na lings!"he'd cry to the gathering gawking crowdsand me, I'd translate, open the roiling cloudsto expose the shining sun, I was the onethat had a way with the local lingo,this guttural sputtering spitting speechthese brutes had cobbled together ... bingo!and called the Ingurish tongue.

When the castle in time was attackedJock and I were the first amongthe prisoners who escaped: the queen,I'm happy to say, was repeatedly raped,incessantly, in fact, to her heart's content,and subsequently went to live in Ghentwith the gentleman-rapist best endowed.

Her husband, the king, did not fare so well:fearful, tearful, and thoroughly cowedhe was hastened on his way to hell,garrotted, impaled, and buried in lime,dug up, hanged, then burnt at the stake,as an afterthought slung into a lake.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Jock and I married two bonny sisters,we set up a tea shop in Ayre.Damn the speeches, no more emotional fits,we've become Democratic Socialists.The girls run the shop, God bless 'em,we smoke our pipes in the garden.

Monday, May 04, 2009

Trudishould have died three hundred timesif her friends, good Germans,hadn't saved her:she was a Jewish childin Hitler's Deutschland.We are allsomebody's kidand me, I'm a jigaboo.I'm a black manhiding in a white skin.